Jared shrugged. “No idea,” he answered. “I bought this from a yearbook dealer on eBay.”
“What was Chris in 2006,” I asked, leafing through the book, “a senior?”
Jared nodded. I thumbed through the pages until I found the entry for Christopher Danielson. Like his brother, Chris was a good-looking kid, but one whose features clearly resembled those of his deceased father. Jared, on the other hand, bore more of a resemblance to their mother. Even in the head shot, Christopher Danielson exuded “attitude.” The smirk on his face said he saw himself as something of a wiseass. He probably drove his teachers nuts.
Beneath the photo there was nothing listed other than his name—no clubs, no honors, no sports affiliations. Chris had been a senior that year, but in name only—apparently putting in his time without actively participating in any school-related activities. If memory served, class pictures were generally taken at the beginning of a school year rather than at the end.
“Did he graduate?” I asked.
Jared shook his head. “Not as far as I can tell.”
I studied the photo again. It was a dozen years old at this point, so without going through the relatively expensive process of computer-generated age enhancement, it probably wouldn’t be helpful. Appearance has a lot to do with lifestyle, and drug use, booze, and other bad choices tend to speed up the aging process—and not in a good way.
“When was he born?”
“September eighteenth, 1988,” Jared answered.
“Where?”
“Group Health in Seattle.”
“What’s the connection to Homer?” I asked.
“That’s where my father’s parents were born. His father was a halibut fisherman. They lived in Seattle while he was working in the fishing fleet out of Ballard. They moved back home to Alaska after he retired.”
The Ballard fishing community is small and tight. There was a good chance that Jared’s grandfather and my stepgrandfather, Lars, had known each other.
“Our dad was still in high school here at the time,” Jared continued. “He went back to Alaska with them for a while, but once he graduated from high school, he came home to Seattle and enrolled at the U-Dub. That’s where he and Mom met—at the University of Washington. She was there on a nursing scholarship.”
You’d think that in the course of working with Sue Danielson for a couple of years, I would have been familiar with some of this family history, but I wasn’t. As far as partners go, she was anything but a Chatty Cathy. Considering the complexities of her home life, that wasn’t too surprising.
“Nursing?” I repeated.
Jared nodded. “Turns out she didn’t like it. She dropped out of nursing after her sophomore year. Without the scholarship she couldn’t afford the out-of-state tuition, so she quit college completely. My dad had graduated by then, so they got married. I’m pretty sure she was already expecting me at the time, and that’s why they tied the knot that summer, but they didn’t exactly live happily ever after.”
That last bit wasn’t news to anyone.
“Your dad was in banking?” I asked after a moment.
“Insurance, actually,” Jared replied. “Something bad must have happened—I never knew what, but he ended up losing his license for one reason or another, and then his job. That’s about the time things started going downhill. With him out of work and drinking more and more, Mom went to work at the 911 Call Center. Sometime later she hired on with Seattle PD, and then she got pregnant with Chris. I’m not sure, but I suspect getting pregnant with him was some kind of last-ditch effort in trying to save the marriage. If so, it didn’t work, because Dad kept right on spiraling. She ended up throwing him out shortly after Chris was born. That’s when Dad moved back up to Homer to live with his folks. Mom didn’t get around to finalizing the divorce until . . .” Jared’s voice faded momentarily. “Not long before everything happened,” he finished. “You know all about that.”
Unfortunately, I did know about that, all of it, far more than I was willing to discuss with Jared right then. While the couple was separated and later, after the divorce proceedings, Richard Danielson had been required to pay child support. Because he wasn’t working, as far as anyone knew, the court-ordered amount had been little more than a token, but he hadn’t bothered to pay a penny of it. The week before Sue’s death, Richie had played the oldest card in the divorced-deadbeat-dad playbook—the one where the noncustodial parent appears out of nowhere offering to treat the kids to some kind of expensive gift that Sue, as a single mom struggling to keep food on the table and a roof over her kids’ heads, could never afford.